Chronos
by slightowl
Summary: After the fall of Esset, Crawford and Schuldig have parted ways, though not necessarily to the satisfaction of both parties. (Originally posted in 2010.)
1. In Retrospect

Title: chronos, in retrospect

Fandom: WK

Characters: Crawford/Schuldig, Nagi, mentions of Farfarello.

Rating: R to NC-17ish for some sex/violence.

Notes: Post-Kapital, and - as usual, in my case - ignoring the existence of Gluhen. After the fall of Esset, Crawford and Schuldig have parted ways, though not necessarily to the satisfaction of both parties.

* * *

There are times when sleep fails him — now, much more often than before. He keeps the apartment dark in the night; it's important to maintain that appearance of normality. His sit-ups and bench presses are done by the synthetic green wash of the computer screen, and in complete silence, save for the sucks and gurgles of the late-night bus plowing through the city. He boxes with his reflection in the window. On the monitor, he keeps a scrolling marquee of stock prices in foreign markets. The yen is down, which no longer matters to him. The dollar is down, but that means nothing.

Breathing heavily, he will hang over the numbers and recite them aloud before they roll across the screen. It is unimpressive. A calisthenic exercise for precognitives, nonsense data and unpronounceable acronyms — but the practice itself is comforting. All of time, digitized. Electronic units clicking upwards. The Greeks have a term for it. _Kosmos Aisthetos._ The sensible world.

His windows are towering. His ceilings, high enough to make the silence metastasize, cancerous. He is still awake when the sun begins to rise over distant suburbs. He unlocks his desk drawer and picks up his old gun. He flicks the safety off.

Two years ago, it never would have been on in the first place. Death only needs that millisecond to catch up.

He stands barefoot at his window, with the gun hanging limply against his thigh. He keeps it for nostalgia's sake alone. There is not anyone coming. Not anymore.

"We wanted this," he assures, out loud, to no one.

* * *

There is a remote viewer that works from the basement of a grocery store in China Town. He has a mirthless laugh, and it makes him shake, especially his hands. He wears a ring with a jeweled skull, and the stones in the eyesockets seem to move faster than the rest of him. He laughs when he sees Crawford, and the thousand dollars that Crawford pays him every week floats to the floor. Crawford picks it up, places it back on the table. Above them, the sporadic thump of a basketball hitting the asphalt. Below them, a train burrowing deeper into the earth.

The man mumbles something about a cigarette and Crawford passes him one from the pack in the pocket of his jacket. He hasn't smoked for twelve years, and when he did this wasn't his brand, but the red logo on the package is familiar enough. Crawford reaches over the table, and lights it for him.

"Anything today?," he asks.

"Mm. A woman with a veil over her face, washing clothes in a river. A bull crossing the street with tri-colored flags on its horns."

India, Crawford thinks, and makes an attempt not to question why. Schuldig always did like those colors, after all. The hot pink of ceremonial powders. The blue of a dancing god's skin. Places with mysterious foods and solemn lighting that makes things seem more significant than they do elsewhere.

"There are bodies in the river," the man says. "Bodies burning in the river."

He laughs again. The cigarette falls, rolls across the floor of the room, and continues to burn in the darkness. Crawford does not pick it up.

If he is the man who can see everything — why can't he see this?

* * *

He wears a suit invariably, still, even though what work he does, he does from his apartment. This is mostly suggesting financial strategies to internet entrepreneurs, media chiefs, real estate moguls, barely-post-adolescent boys with more trust fund than they could ever spend on sports cars and cocaine. His reputation is, of course, immaculate. He doesn't need the money, but it keeps his mind and his Talent occupied.

At night, he dines alone in the steakhouse on the corner of his block. The taste of muscle in his mouth, tinged blue with fear and adrenaline, reminds him of another life. He reads novels in German or English. He enjoys them well enough, but he cannot stand to hold on. A soggy paperback, orphaned on a park bench. A leather-bound classic, in the elevator of his building. A truth, abandoned piece by piece.

Even without precognition, he would know to reach into his pocket at 9:55 every Friday to take Nagi's phonecall. The boy is dependable that way.

"He called me last night."

"Who?," Crawford says and cringes slightly, especially when Nagi responds.

"You know who."

"What did he want?"

"It's Schuldig. He philosophized to me in German for half an hour on the subjective nature of reality, then he asked for money."

"And?"

"And I was going to wire him some. But he didn't know where he was."

"I see."

"Do you?"

There is a long pause. In Japan, it is already the future. It may be that which makes Nagi bold. It may be the office on the other side of the line. Nagi, standing at the window with Tokyo, _his _Tokyo, so distant beneath him that it is without depth or dimension. "Maybe you should go find him."

"Not a good idea."

"Why — "

From the other end of the line, Crawford hears the sound of a door opening. Hushed footsteps over carpet.

"Crawford, I have to go."

He folds the phone and drops it into his pocket. As his hand moves back to his thigh, he glances at his watch — sees his face reflected in the crystal. It's just a matter of curiosity, he tells himself. Professional or otherwise.

* * *

Thirteen months ago, they had still been in Asia. Crawford's memories of that crumbling hotel room in Beijing are mostly sensory - the tap of cockroach legs against the floorboards, and through the window, the cadenced wail of a police car.

They spend the majority of their time in bed together, with their hips and shoulders touching. In this memory, one of Schuldig's hands is still wrapped loosely around Crawford's penis. With the other, he is trying to light a damp cigarette that smells like molted vegetables. On the third try, he gets it, but it fizzles out after one drag. Disgusted, Schuldig flattens it into the nightstand, and turns to Crawford, and what he says, neither one of them expected.

"Should I stay with you?"

There is a terrible intimacy in his voice that Crawford cannot reciprocate. That old and lonely loyalty. The Greeks have a term for it. _Synergism_. Crawford stares at the flecks of dark blue at the far-edge of Schuldig's irises. He says, "It doesn't matter to me."

* * *

His car is crossing an avenue on the East Side when Crawford feels his phone vibrate against his thigh. He thinks of the beeswax sheen on Schuldig's lip, and almost doesn't pick up.

The sunlight dulls, as if on cue.

"Hello."

"Farfarello is dead."

"He was — unfit."

"Do you want to know how?"

"It doesn't matter."

"Gunned down by police in Belfast. Not Esset, not Rosenkreuz, not talents. Fucking _cops_. They put six bullets in his brain and he kept coming at them. He stopped after the seventh."

"He was sloppy."

"He was bored."

Crawford watches two busses fight for space on the block ahead. Schuldig says, "You look mopish."

He sees the eyes of the driver staring at him through the rearview mirror.

"Mopish," Crawford repeats. "Did I teach you English?"

"You did."

Schuldig's native German is a hodgepodge of slang and profanity, because it is the German of gutterpunks and street rats. His English is proper, calculated — because it is Crawford's. "I would never use a word like mopish."

Schuldig says something else, but a police cruiser is howling in the lane next to him and by the time it has passed, Schuldig has already hung up the phone.

* * *

On impulse, Crawford buys himself a ticket to England, and rents an apartment in London for two weeks under a fake name. As he is packing, he even sees himself there, hot tea and dull grey light over the Thames. He makes it half-way through the security check at JFK, then turns around without bothering to pick up his bag from the other end of the x-ray machine. The boarding pass is torn into pieces and left in a wastebasket in the parking lot. It is beautiful; the way the future tips beneath his feet, deeper than any sensory experience would allow, the world scrambling to catch up with the single decision that has thrown all of its carefully-laid plans into disarray.

_That_, he thinks, is control.

Not knowing the future. Being able to change it. The Greeks have a term for it. _Hubris_.

* * *

Crawford has an unresolved memory of Schuldig, sweating, laying on top of the sheets in his underwear, eating an old sandwich. The plastic wrap is making a strange cackling sound. There are cobwebs everywhere — dead insects cacooned in silk. Different city, same hotel room, or so it seems.

Schuldig's head is wagging slightly. He is drinking cheap vodka right out of the bottle, passing it to Crawford only when he is feeling particularly generous. Neither one has slept well for weeks, and Crawford's face and palms feel greasy from cheap street foods. Both of their defenses are adrift.

Before, when they fucked, they may as well have been fighting. One long unfinished argument, carried over from their days together at Rosenkreuz. This new Schuldig is sullen; not quite as cruel, more attentive to detail, running his fingertips along the strip of sensitive tissue below Crawford's stomach, exhaling over Crawford's pulse. They are too tired for anything urgent. He moves over Schuldig slowly, and Schuldig strains his head forward, speaks directly into Crawford's mouth and the alcohol singes his tastebuds. _How much more? How much longer can we handle this?_

Is this why Schuldig is guilty? Because he is a thief who has been handed all the passcodes, rifling through every intimate shameful humiliating secret?

_How much longer can we handle this?_

Crawford doesn't know.

Schuldig says, "I'm going to leave tomorrow."

"No," Crawford tells him, "You won't."

The sleep on opposite sides of the bed, not touching. Sometime in the night, he feels Schuldig's mouth against his cheekbone. It is not a kiss. Just a graze of lips light enough to ignore. In the morning, both Schuldig and his bags are gone. He forgets a pack of cigarettes, with a bright red logo. His green double-breasted trenchcoat, also left behind, is splayed out on the floor like a hollow person.

Brad Crawford and the world scramble to catch up.

* * *

He drives himself to New Jersey, and in the passenger seat, the gun is restless with potential energy. Deliberately, Crawford turns away from the future. He doesn't stop to read the name of the exit he takes off the highway; he veers down side streets and main streets, following no pattern. The motel parking lot that he pulls into is the same, random, a non-choice. Room eight, only because the bronze number is flipped on its side, and this obscurely pleases him.

Crawford cracks his knuckles. Slips on a pair of leather gloves. Once, Crawford had taught Schuldig how to speak English and how to shield his mind, and Schuldig had taught Crawford how to hotwire cars and pick locks.

The man in the room tries to hand him his wallet before Crawford has the chance to say a word. Farfarello would have drawn this out for hours — and Schuldig, he likes to throw his fish back so he can catch them again later. Crawford wants neither of these things. He shoots before the man has the chance to establish any context. The Greeks have a term for it. _Euthanasia_.

The man. The ache in his shoulder. The gastric pains in his intestines. The dry flake of unrinsed soap on his palms. The last spurt of desperate biochemistry. Then, he is gone.

Crawford takes a step back. He exhales, dissatisfied. On the drive home, he makes a game of predicting the state of the market, sliding back into the comfort of knowing.

* * *

Crawford remembers farther back, now. Before the running. Schwarz's first year in Japan.

Nagi is very young and still in his helpful-phase. When they order Chinese takeout, he distributes the packets of soy sauce and patiently extracts the snap peas out of Schuldig's lo mein, because Nagi knows he hates them. Schuldig is picky about his food and picky about his liquor; with dinner, he drinks imported vodka out of an eight-ounce cup filled with ice. With a quiet laugh, he says: "In all the history of dysfunctional families. You know, one day, we will be nostalgic for this."

Nagi asks what _nostalgic_ means and looks to Crawford.

Crawford says, "It means nothing."

* * *

Today, Crawford's sweater hangs lopsided. The remote viewer says: "Dry hills. Olive trees. A doorway paved with a blue mosaic. A woman in white linen shorts."

Crawford leaves ten-thousand in freshly minted hundred-dollar bills. As he climbs the stairs, he hears them rustling to the floor, but he does not turn around.

He packs by the silver-twinge of evening light that comes in through the window. The moon is maybe eighteen days into its cycle. The stock ticker is off. His bank is failing, and he knew it would happen four days ago, and still he left his money where it was. He feels fine. More attuned to the dull heat of the future in his lower brain, firing randomly now with no numbers to occupy it.

Crawford's body is humming.

He calls the airport and books a flight to Athens, knowing Schuldig will be gone by the time he gets there, but his trail will still be fresh. He packs his suits and his cellphone. A green trenchcoat that has been in a plastic bag on the floor of his closet. The computer, wiped clean and abandoned along with the apartment. The gun, he dismantles. Some of it goes down his floor's enormous trash chute. The rest of it is hidden. He will have to buy another one,when he touches down in Europe.

This time, he will not turn around.

The Greeks have a term for it. _Moira_. Destiny.


	2. Fast Forward

Title: chronos, fast forward

Fandom: WK

Characters: Crawford/Schuldig, mention of Nagi

Rating: R to NC-17ish for sex.

Notes: Post-Kapital, and - as usual, in my case - ignoring the existence of Gluhen. A sequel to chronos, in retrospect. After the fall of Esset, Crawford and Schuldig have parted ways, though not necessarily to the satisfaction of both parties. (Or, in which, Crawford catches up to Schuldig, and both parties are generally annoyed.)

* * *

_Fürchtet euch nicht zu leiden, die Schwere,_

_gebt sie zurück an der Erde Gewicht;_

_schwer sind die Berge, schwer sind die Meere._

~ Rilke

* * *

"It just seems," Crawford says, "rather meaningless."

Crawford moves the salt shaker strategically; a barricade of condiment bottles, used silverware, large cups full of ice that leave condensation on their hands. It's not conscious, this placement of as many things between them as possible. Crawford doesn't know he's doing it. Schuldig notices, but says nothing. If he did, Crawford would stop, and Schuldig needs these habits — needs to remember that beneath Crawford's impermeable upper layer, the private blankness, there is something as unlearned and bitter as he is.

Outside, the city is bleached out by sun. The air tastes like iron oxide; that peculiar seaside rust on rows of parked bicycles and balconies. The tourists wear sandals and sag forward from the weight of their cameras. Before this, they had been in Madrid. Before that, some motionless mountain town in the Pyrenees. "What's meaningless?"

"Shouldn't there be some sense of destination? I'm not talking specifics, here. Doesn't the journey lose its meaning if there's no _notion_ of an end?"

"I thought Americans fantasized about being peripatetic."

"Schuldig," Crawford says.

Later, they'll dodge through cars and backfiring Vespas. Walk up to the broken city wall and sit on one of the remaining upright fragments, watching the lights turn on, one by one. Crawford will study Schuldig's face for signs of restlessness. He will find them. "Where are we going next?"

And Schuldig will be struck with that same blank fear, trailing him since Italy. Why, suddenly, does Crawford want him to be making decisions? The last year has been patternless, structureless, full of inconsistencies — both inner and outer. Morning through an airport and evening through a train station, before he's had a chance to learn the name of the city around him.

"Don't you _know_?," he'll snap.

* * *

Crawford had caught up to him in Naples.

Schuldig had taken a ferry from Greece, and then spent three weeks drinking wine and wandering the ruins of the Roman empire; stepping carefully through the lost pediment and free standing columns, the overgrown walled gardens, the friezes with their faces worn away. Maybe it was the warmth, or the trees, full of olives so ripe they appeared on the verge of bursting — but in those first weeks, Schuldig could hardly control his own powers of seduction. Italian girls with wide hips and sloping stomachs and beautiful tawny hairs on their arms. Boys full of machismo, who gripped his hips too tightly, having no idea he could ease them into a perpetual sleep without having to say a word. He took their wallets, but because the Mediterranean was so unsettlingly blue, he let them keep their lives.

There is a seat waiting for Crawford, and also, an expresso. He is wearing grey slacks and a loose shirt. His hair is to his chin. Schuldig nearly doesn't recognize him; he is supposed to be the one prone to constant rearrangement, to not quite knowing who he is. He speaks in Italian, because it is easier to run parallel to the minds around him, and because he knows Crawford will find it obnoxious. "Still one sugar, no milk, right?"

Crawford sits down, drops his messenger bag to his feet. Aside from it, he doesn't seem to be carrying anything else. He answers in English. "Have a secondary talent I don't know about?"

"No. The cab driver who picked you up in Salerno thought you were a lousy tipper."

They watch the laundry blowing back and forth on a cast-iron balcony. A blue dress filling with air. The clothes are three-quarters of the way dry, before Crawford says: "You've covered quite some ground."

The waiter brings him another coffee. Schuldig sips it too soon, and the skin on the tip of his tongue recoils. He feels Crawford's hand touch his knee beneath the table, but the motion seems too practiced, rhetorical. What Schuldig thinks is: _Fuck you. Was America so fucking boring? Couldn't find another army of psychics to command? Couldn't find yourself a fuck as good as I am?_

What he says is: "I have a room in the hotel down the street."

(And in twenty minutes, Crawford will have him pinned against a wall, not even bothering to lock the door behind them. Crawford will kiss him, and Schuldig will feel like he's going to choke. Crawford's chest is very warm, and his hands firm, putting downward pressure on Schuldig's shoulders, bringing him to his knees.)

Wann aber _sind_ wir?

* * *

The voices are always a part of the landscape. Schuldig has trouble picking them apart — French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese. He speaks a dog-mix of everything, and people understand. Years ago, it had been his job to teach Nagi German and English. The boy had been frightened, half-feral, but allowed Schuldig to lay his hands on der Tisch, the chair, meine Nase, your knee, loyalty, and Schwarz, Schwarz über alles.

That is how Nagi had come to know the world, impossible as it is to separate the essence of things from their names. It had taken years for Crawford to perfect his Japanese, translating forms and business documents with a dictionary and a grammar guide. He had watched from the doorway, something strange in his face. Envy, Schuldig had believed, being naive enough himself, but then Crawford had never before seemed interested in _connecting_.

They trade one-hundred euros and a pair of Armani sunglasses for a fifteen-year-old powder blue Fiat. Maybe it is Crawford's idea of a joke. The upholstery smells like spearmint, which is more sinister than whatever it is meant to cover up. When Crawford hands him the keys, Schuldig tosses them back.

"What," Crawford says, "stopping now?," but he climbs into the driver's seat regardless. They head south. "We're going to run out of continent soon."

"Then, I suppose we'll take a boat."

"What are you trying to accomplish here?"

Schuldig likes Spain. He likes the little plastic statues of Saint James; Saint James, _Santiago Matamoros_, Moor-killer, in a soldier's armor but a pilgrims hat, half militant, half holy. It reminds him of the pedantic violence he knows Crawford is capable of. Outside, the flatlands of La Mancha give way to hills. They look like the great arched backs of animals, moving slowly beneath the earth. Crawford pulls into a gas station and returns with a bag of chips and a chocolate bar, which he tosses into Schuldig's lap. Schuldig notes, idly, that it is his favorite kind.

"How is Nagi?"

"He's fine. He practically runs Japan these days. He could give you a job, if you wanted."

"I don't."

"Then, what are you going to do?"

Schuldig gestures to the road, to the black asphalt receding into the horizon.

"This," Crawford says. "This isn't doing anything."

He leans back against the headrest. His green trench-coat is draped over it; it smells like a disinfected American apartment. He hasn't worn it yet. He relies on this stubbornness to keep him alive.

"Then why are you still here?"

* * *

He'd probably known it was going to happen before it did. Schuldig, thirteen, is staring up bravely, defiantly — as if it is Crawford who has just leaned forward and crushed their mouths together. He is wearing the grey Rosenkreuz uniform, some ridiculous piece of fabric tied around his wrist, peach or salmon, has always had a fondness for rare colors. His face looks bloodless in the sixty watts of florescent light above them.

"What was that for?"

"Saw you doing it with Heinrich behind the tool shed in the training field."

_Shit, _Crawford thinks, and then remembers that Schuldig is a compulsive voyeur, both through his eyes and through his brain. "So?"

"I want to try."

"You were no good."

Which isn't a lie. His mouth had felt cold and clumsy, his hands limp at his sides, then on Crawford's forearms, then down again. They are in the laundry room. What rhythm he'd kept, he'd kept with the nonsense tap of buttons and zippers against the insides of the machines.

"So," Schuldig says, and Crawford leans down to give him a second chance.

* * *

They rent an apartment in Málaga, because Schuldig likes the name. A wide word, fine repeating vowels. They can see the port from their southern-facing window. Crawford wears polo shirts and jeans, which makes Schuldig irritable. He remembers Crawford pushing back the sleeve of a suit to look at his watch; the importance of every gesture in that manner of dress, the slight bulge of a holster beneath his jacket. Now, he wakes early to manage his accounts while the American markets are open, pale and shirtless, his eyes on the ocean heaving in the distance. Their bed is a mess of newspapers, empty cigarette packs, gum wrappers, a moleskine notebook where Crawford is always making notations that Schuldig can't understand. When they fuck, it is controlled — it reflects nothing of the fraying sheets, the filters accumulating in the ashtray.

Usually, Schuldig hasn't slept by the time Crawford is waking, neurotic from too many cigarettes, smoking one right after the other. He'll feel the sofa cushion sink down and a hand against his hair. There is something about the early morning light that makes Crawford's face look fonder — not like it usually is, an unattended switchboard, lights blinking on and off, and but no human being at the controls. He says, "If you want to keep going, there's always Africa. Plenty of Africa before we would run out of road."

"Africa," Schuldig says, "has too many fucking mosquitoes." He feels Crawford touch his earlobe. He closes his eyes. "India had a lot of fucking mosquitoes too, but I like curry. I was in India for a while."

Crawford nearly says_I know,_ before catching himself. He can feel Schuldig's telepathy against the nerves in his fingertips. Dendrites, axons, action potentials. It is impossible to separate the essence of things from their names.

"There was this guru in Varanasi. Big thing with, you know, the kind of bearded Westerner who wears Birkenstocks and eats wheat germ. Trying to reach enlightenment by stuffing hot coals down their pants, or who knows what the fuck. I went there because I wanted to see the inside of his head. It was like he was burning his personal mind away, layer by layer. The deeper I went, the less of him there was — Atman, that is what they call it. Atman. Do you know what I saw when I got to the core?"

"What?"

"That what he really wanted was a fucking Nissan Altima."

He feels Crawford's stomach laugh against his forehead. His fingers trace the whorl of the cartilage in Schuldig's ear. There is lightening over the ocean, very far away. "People are shit," Schuldig says. And then, after a moment, "But _you_ came back."

Crawford's face is blank again. "Not even a very decent car."

* * *

It's the kind of memory he can still see in the present tense.

They are on his bed at Rosenkreuz. Crawford is between his legs, and Schuldig really likes how his hipbones feel against the insides of his knees, but still — he thinks Crawford can probably see how fast is heart is running through his chest.

"Are we _going to_?," he asks, and the absurdity of this question magnifies it. He might as well have screamed the words. He might as well have made a sign: 15-YEAR-OLD TELEPATH/ABOUT TO GET FUCKED FOR THE FIRST TIME/TERRIFIED.

Crawford's shirt is off, his pants unbuttoned. Schuldig can see the head of his cock through the open waistband. "Even if we don't now, we will later."

"So this is a matter of pragmatism, then."

Schuldig hates it; the cold lubrication sliding down his ass, and Crawford forcing himself in, his fingers at first, then his penis. Nothing about it feels right, and it _hurts_, and it's fucking embarrassing, the way his teeth grind together, and the sounds their bodies make, and the whine in his throat, and Crawford's cum inside of him, and then his own between Crawford's fingers and on his stomach. And when he withdraws, that's the worse. That's when Schuldig's little locus of shame really seems to expand.

"You'll like it, eventually," Crawford says. He is no good at feigning apologetic.

After, when he has had a chance to really consider it, Schuldig wants to say, "We're never doing that again," but the room is cold. Crawford has fallen asleep against his shoulder, and the light is passing over his face in phases, and their bodies are angled together, alternating legs and arms. He presses his forehead into the ditch above Crawford's collarbone. He studies the micro-details of Crawford's skin, the variations in pore size and color, the tiny lattice-work of capillaries.

If he wakes, Schuldig considers, he can always blame it on the temperature.

* * *

The burnt, electrical silence of dawn. Or is it twilight?

These are the only times in which their waking lives intersect.

"From here, there's only South or West."

"Let's take a flight to Mexico. I hear there's whole industries based on depravity in Mexico."

"They have that everywhere."

Neither one of them packs.

* * *

"Come on," Crawford says. "Wake up."

There is an urgency in his voice that it at once unexpected and familiar. No one else can talk like that; a studious monotone that commands as much attention as if he had taken Schuldig by the shoulders and shouted, 'This is an _emergency_.' He is wearing a suit, and lit theatrically from behind. Crawford always knows where to stand in a room, how to impose his foresight unto everyone around him.

"Mprh?," Schuldig says, into the pillow.

Crawford tosses the green trench-coat at him. "Get dressed."

* * *

He is delirious, probably hallucinating, but he knows to be lucky that the blow didn't snap is spine in two. "Fucking golf clubs," he can hear himself saying, his breath rippling with laughter, "Does it hurt? Does it hurt?"

Nagi had helped to ease him unto the bed, but he is gone now, and the room is dark. Crawford watches through the night, monitoring his breathing with a hand mirror, wiping the blood from the corner of his mouth when it threatens to choke him.

"You're an idiot," he says quietly, and for a moment, there is something that Schuldig comprehends — dehydrated, hypoxic — something immensely significant, and then it is gone, like a language that changes in the moment before it can be understood.

Crawford's hand is gentle over his.

* * *

The chatter of minds is always constant, white noise to which he is mostly accustomed (and indeed, the one time Rosenkreuz doctors pumped him full of enough drugs to completely suppress his telepathy, he had panicked, claustrophobic, a rodent suddenly realizing the cage has snapped shut behind him). Still, it has been several months since he has had to navigate any deeper than this aerial perspective. Below, there is a monument of complexity — mystifying self-awareness, metabolism, feedback loops, patterns, filing cabinets full of memories, both real and imagined. This sojourn in the man's head leaves him dizzy, feeling undefined around the edges.

"You're out of shape."

"I got it, didn't I?"

"Tomorrow, practice. And we're going running in the morning."

They find a bar open along the harbor, and Crawford buys him a beer and a plate of fried potatoes to replace what Schuldig has thrown up through the passenger-side window of the Fiat. He explains what he has pulled from the man's mind as best he can. It is difficult. It is impossible to separate the essence of things from their names, and these things have no names. Crawford listens, storing the information, absently spinning his glass on the countertop. The sun is rising in a zigzag reflection over the water. Schuldig wants to take a sense impression of this moment. They are _his_ moments, after all, if he cannot remember them, they never happened.

"So," he says finally. "I'm assuming that was not a matter of personal curiosity."

"Professional."

"Herr Crawford, what _is_ your profession, nowadays?"

"Schwarz," he says, "is taking back Europe. Then, Asia."

"Ambitious."

"Interesting."

"You'll need a haircut."

"You'll need a gun."

"We'll need to get rid of this car."

Schuldig knocks his bottle against the side of Crawford's glass. White sails are appearing on the horizon. He could play-act disinterest, but that game has become boring to him. The restlessness is ever-present, but he realizes now, it can be channeled into something more productive. His smile remains unaffected, but something stiffens beneath his breastbone. "Where are we going next?"

"Austria, then Tokyo. But we don't have to leave today."

* * *

Much later, Schuldig lays awake against Crawford's leg. The sound of running water from the surrounding apartments is familiar enough to be comforting, but it cannot compete with the back-from-the-dead intensity of the adrenaline rushing through his brain. He presses one palm flat against Crawford's chest and notes, with some satisfaction, that Crawford's heart is beating as fast as his is.

* * *

_fin._


End file.
